Coed bathrooms, locker rooms coming to Mass.

I think if the bill passes as is, there will be a lot of men identifying more with women than with men. But I wonder if the reverse will be true. Here is an editorial about the bill someone posted on a music message board I frequent.

Society should protect the rights of minorities. But it should do so with care and common sense, to make sure it does not trample the rights of everybody else.

That is not the case with a bill now pending in the Legislature — an Act Relative to Gender Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes — to allow transgendered persons to use public bathrooms of their choice. It's been called the "bathroom bill" by critics, because its loose language allows men to enter women's bathrooms, locker rooms or health clubs if they claim to identify with the female gender. Critics claim it opens the door for sexual predators to legally enter places that are normally reserved for women, to stare or perhaps do worse things.

Whether that contention proves true or not, it's clear that more care and common sense must be exercised before it comes to a vote.

It is one thing for a person born as a man who has been surgically altered to become a woman to be allowed to use the women's bathroom. It is something else entirely to allow a man who has had nothing altered, but simply claims he "identifies" as a woman, to use the women's bathroom.

That is a recipe for embarrassment, fear and even confrontation — the kind of things most legislators would probably say they want to prevent. The New Hampshire House of Representatives, which passed a similar law recently, may find it has been hasty.

As written, the proposed law makes no distinction between the two situations. There is nothing in the language that defines what transgendered means.

That is probably because the various definitions of transgender are so amorphous and broad. According to one, it is "a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies that diverge from the normative role (man or woman) commonly, but not always, assigned at birth, as well as the role traditionally held by society." Some definitions refer to it as "a third gender."

In short, it can mean virtually anything that doesn't fit so-called "normative" gender roles. And there is no requirement that there be any sort of medical diagnosis or confirmation of that. As written, the bill leaves it all up to the individual. And that has the potential to take rights away from others.

If people can use whatever bathrooms, locker rooms or other public facilities that they feel like using, based on their own profession of their gender identity, there is no point in having separate facilities any more. Clearly, that's not what this bill is intended to do.

Lawmakers have been hearing plenty of feedback from the public and have acknowledged the language in this bill needs to be tightened.

Nobody should be persecuted for gender identity. But any law aimed at preventing it should be much more specific than the one now on the table.

The nitwits (I'd say commies, except they bend over backward to protect the rich here) who run my county passed a similar law last year. When opponents of it tried to get a referendum going, a judge basically bailed out the county and squashed it at the last minute. The whole thing was a clusterfuck, on both sides. But the government guys won.